Victor Burgin Quotes

• A job the artist does which no-one else does is to dismantle existing communication codes and to combine some of their elements into structures which can be used to generate new pictures of the world.

  Victor Burgin

  Jobs, Communication, Artist

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• Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of 'just looking'.

  Victor Burgin

  Indifferent

  Victor Burgin, Alexander Streitberger (2009). “Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin”, p.118, Leuven University Press

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• The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imagined plenitude.

  Victor Burgin

  Reality, Identity, Coherence

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• Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.

  Victor Burgin

  Photograph, Conviction, Complicity

  Victor Burgin (1982). “Thinking photography”

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• Even the uncaptioned art photograph is invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other.

  Victor Burgin

  Art, Memories, Association

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• It seems to be extensively believed by photographers that meanings are to be found in the world much in the way rabbits are found in downs, and all that is required is the talent to spot them and the skill to shoot them... But those moments of truth for which the photographic opportunist waits, finger on the button, are as great a mystification as the notion of autonomous creativity.

  Victor Burgin

  Creativity, Skills, Waiting

  Victor Burgin, Alexander Streitberger (2009). “Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin”, p.64, Leuven University Press

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• The only pertinent political question in relation to an identity [or its photograph] is not Is it really coherent? but What does it actually achieve?

  Victor Burgin

  Political, Identity, Doe

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